I write about popular music from a management perspective using research on management and entrepreneurship. I show a different side of musicians by taking them seriously as navigators of their own careers, as leaders of small businesses, and as part of self-managed creative teams. I have a Ph.D. in Management and Organizations from the University of Michigan. I am writing a book about concert industry professionals.

“The three most important things a manager does,” says longtime Alice Cooper manager Shep Gordon in a new documentary “is (1) get the money, (2) always remember to get the money, and (3) never forget to always remember to get the money.” Gordon’s focus on “The Money” is not surprising given the enormous financial success of many of his clients, who included Alice Cooper, Teddy Pendergrass, Anne Murray, Luther Vandross, Blondie and Raquel Welch, as well as celebrity chefs Roger Vergé, Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, Emeril Lagasse and Paul Prudhomme.

What is perhaps more surprising, and what makes the title of the documentary noteworthy, is that Shep Gordon was a kind and compassionate human being. “Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon” was directed by Mike Myers and includes interviews with Gordon himself as well as numerous clients and friends who have been touched by his incredible generosity and menschness.

The movie makes a convincing case that Shep Gordon infused his business dealings with compassion and generosity. “What’s really important for me,” he says, “is to do compassionate business.” This is why he took upon himself to put the business affairs of Groucho Marx in order, pro bono. Or why he took on chefs as clients, even though at their highest earning potential they were making the same amount of money in a year that one of his successful rock stars was making a night.

His venture into managing chefs came out of a friendship with Roger Vergé, the three-Michelin rated chef of Le Moulin des Mougins in Cannes. Gordon discovered that Vergé was regularly forbidden from eating at venues where he would be a guest chef because he was considered “the help.” He was paid poorly, despite the $2500 a plate price tag. Wolfgang Puck confided to Gordon that the same held for other chefs. “The only place they made money was cooking in a building,” notes Gordon. “Nobody had a clear path how to monetize their talent and expand it.”

Though he got into the chef business for reasons of compassion, he didn’t leave his business hat at the door. He put his experience, acumen and creativity to use, securing product and licensing deals for his clients and utilizing the potential of the then-nascent Food Network to make them wealthy. In fact, Emeril Lagasse, whose net worth is estimated at about $50 million, credits Gordon with single-handedly inventing the construct of a “celebrity chef.”

According to Shirli Kopelman, faculty director of business practice at the Center for Positive Organizations at The University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and author of Negotiating Genuinely: Being Yourself in Business, the combination of compassion and strategic focus is what enables great negotiators to create value.

“The biggest problem people have when they negotiate is that they are either genuinely compassionate or they are strategic,” Kopelman told me. “It takes great negotiators to do them both. What naturally happens is that we develop more to be one type of negotiator than the other. When you ask people to think about themselves in a particular setting, they will see they are either focused on the money or focused on compassion.”

According to Kopelman, when people take on a work role, they put up a wall between that role and other aspects of their self. “So they think the role of the manager is just to be a business person without the part of their personality that’s about compassion,” she said. “When you can integrate your roles and integrate those different parts of you then you’re able to do both at work and outside of work.”

When people integrate their various personal and professional roles—agent, manager, chef, son, friend, music lover—they can create more value because they are more creative. They have access to a broader repertoire of knowledge and ideas. The combination of various aspects of the self can spark new patterns of thoughts, feelings, and perspectives.

Shep Godron was an innovative and creative manager. He came up with many of Alice Cooper’s outlandish stunts, including staging a breakdown of a truck in London’s busy Piccadilly Circus displaying a huge nude photo of the singer with a python hiding his private parts. Gordon was also the one who brought the doomed chicken to Alice Cooper’s show at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival concert in 1969, turning the show into one of history’s most notorious publicity stunts. Gordon had the brilliant, if slightly impractical, idea to wrap the “School’s Out” LP in panties. For client Teddy Pendergrass, Gordon conceived of concerts for women only and gave female fans teddy bear lollipops to enjoy during the show.

According to Kopelman, artists and innovators are particularly vulnerable to leaving money on the table by not being strategic enough. “The kind of people who are good at building community or having innovative ideas for a startup don’t necessarily have the skills to be strategic and make their idea work financially,” Kopelman said. “The trap for a lot of people when they’re focused on building and being creative is that they forget to collect value they’ve created. You can’t just build, you have to be focused on how much value you just created and how much of that are you getting.”

According to Gordon, “There aren’t winners and losers, only winners.” That elusive win-win approach comes from bringing both strategy and compassion into his work life. But if you are a win-win kind of person, don’t forget to also “get the money.”

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